


Consulting

by altmodes



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Autism, First Kiss, Mystery, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 14:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10698543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altmodes/pseuds/altmodes
Summary: Nightbeat is having some trouble figuring this one out, and Brainstorm is the right mech to ask.





	Consulting

“Can you speculate _off_ of my nuclear spectrometer? It’s _very sensitive_ \--”

“You’re not using it.” Nightbeat doesn’t move, whether to uncross his legs from where he’s perched on top of the cage of reinforced glass spinners or to look up.

“Oh, I am,” Brainstorm huffs. There’s a long delay, about two kliks (long for Brainstorm), where Nightbeat is reasonably sure Brainstorm is coming up with what exactly he’s using the machine for. “The cooldown phase is crucial to keep the chemicals stable during spectroanalysis. Which, you know, pish posh hand-holding safety regs, but if you think you’ll be the one responsible for blowing up my lab and not me--”

Nightbeat stopped paying attention a clause or two ago. He props his cheek up on his hand and whirrs his discontent. It’s a long tone, like rain on a foggy day. A miserable, boring day when you’re stuck inside and have nothing but board games because you’re sure to rust if you go out but you’ll die if you stay in, and your mind is going too, too fast. The monotonous drone of his voicebox humming out the puzzle his mind spins over and over again.

“Are you _really_ \--”

“Want to do a consult?” Nightbeat’s tone perks up, like the sun coming out behind the clouds in a cartoon.

“-- _really_ going to sit there and not even tell me-- what?” Brainstorm’s bright optics go wide. It’s never clear to Nightbeat what that means. Sometimes it’s fear. People do that a lot at crime scenes, or with bodies around. Brainstorm’s optics always sparkle when they’re like this, so whatever it means, Nightbeat finds he likes it.

“Do. You want. To do a consult. On this case. With me.”

Brainstorm goes silent for a beat, and Nightbeat wonders if he said something wrong. Maybe he should have said it slower. Faster? No, definitely slower. Did he tell Brainstorm what the case was? Before he can decide whether to clarify, though, he’s cut off by the sound of shattering glass.

Brainstorm’s delicately folded wings have unfolded not so delicately, flipping a couple of flasks off one of his lab desks nearby and sending them to their doom. One of them had something purple in it which is now a shimmering vapor in the air. Brainstorm doesn’t seem concerned, but he’s also bouncing. Just a little.

“Yes! Yes! What are we consulting?”

Nightbeat unfolds his legs and hops down off the spectrometer, rattling the delicate glass mechanisms inside. Brainstorm doesn’t mention it, or seem to notice. Nightbeat stretches. How long’s he been sitting there exactly? Not long enough to figure this out, long enough to annoy Brainstorm, so unknowable without checking a chronometer. “You’re consulting, and we’re investigating, and I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.”

“Oooh. Okay. What’s the mystery? What do we do? What are the specifications?”

Nightbeat taps his mouth. Brainstorm is watching him carefully, still flapping his wings in a slow rhythm.

“Well, okay. You might have some perspective on this. You know Crosshairs. Well, you knew him.”

“Who?”

“Crosshairs. Car alt, red and blue, weapons engineer. He was at Kimia, escaped on-shuttle with you and Chromedome.”

“I don’t recall. You may have heard, I was very busy at Kimia, I created a lot of super death weapons and sat through a lot of meetings about whether that was ‘bad’.”

“Yeah, I was on the ethics committee, Brainstorm. Anyway, I’ve got reports Crosshairs has been sneaking out of his hab suite for a couple weeks. Eight. Eight weeks.”

“What do you mean, reports?”

“I have Swerve send Slamdance up some extra boosters for his surveillance night shifts in exchange for tipping me anything interesting he sees on the cameras. He showed me the footage. Definitively shows some sneaking activity.”

“And… have you followed Crosshairs?”

Brainstorm puts his thumb and finger on his chin, tapping his foot.

“I’ve tried. I’ve been staking out his room, but maybe he got tipped, he hasn’t come out of his hab after start of night cycle for the past week.”

“Sooo… maybe Crosshairs just sleepwalks.”

Nightbeat shakes his head.

“Good thought, but I snuck his medical history and there’s nothing like that. Reasonably average fellow, disappointingly. You turn up all kinds of things with people's background files.”

“So where _is_ he sneaking out to?”

“That’s the thing.” Nightbeat snaps his fingers. “He just vanishes. Like I said, I checked the surveillance footage Slamdance sent and he just walks off the angle of one camera and doesn’t show up on another one for a couple hours. Bwip. Gone.”

Brainstorm rattles out a hollow laugh. “He’s probably just clanging someone.”

Nightbeat stops. His head cocks to the side. He’s not very good at reading sarcasm, but if he had to play the game he thinks of as ‘guess the emotion,’ then Brainstorm is either… bitter or low on energon.

“Clanging…” Nightbeat’s voice is dubious.

An alarm sounds. Brainstorm nearly takes another set of vials out with a wing when he starts with surprise, and begins fiddling with some dials on his wrist. “Whooooops, that’s my awkward situation alarm. Thought I had that deactivated since it turned out it was creating vicious cycles. Looks like it’s still working though, we’re at about a… logarithmic 7.0. What was I saying? Nothing at all. Maybe he was having a rendezvous. With someone. Doing secret things.”

Nightbeat dials his visor settings onto heat-sensitive to pick up the flush of heat spreading across Brainstorm’s face and extremities, along with the quivering that’s picked up once again in his wings and hands. Interesting. Mystery 2.0: what on the Seething Moon is going on with Brainstorm all of a sudden. He’s not sure _what_ his new partner is talking about, but maybe this wasn’t a terrible idea.

“I’ve been through that section of the ship, though. There’s _plenty_ of things the rest of the crew is hiding-- there always are-- but nothing I’m seeing that overlaps _there_. I haven’t found anything in the infrastructure that would indicate secret passages-- ajar windows-- smuggling--”

Brainstorm raises a hand. “What section is this, anyway? Who are we talking about?”

Nightbeat counts on his fingers. His tone is rote: he goes over this list constantly in his head, looking for a break in the random pattern of names down the hallway. “Mainframe and Jackpot, Waverider and Turbine, Groove and Streetwise, Toxin and--”

“Toxin,” Brainstorm muses.

Nightbeat focuses his visor. “What about Toxin?”

“Tell me about Crosshairs again.”

Nightbeat focuses his visor _again_. Brainstorm folds his arms and leans against the lab table behind him, staring at the wall and tapping his chin. Nightbeat pulls up his dossier via his HUD. “Crosshairs, weapons engineer at Kimia, your period and branch but not department, I think. More conventional models, not theoretical. He’s detail-oriented. Draws his letters with a compass and crosses them with a ruler, if you follow me. I have a joke in an anecdote in this file that says his guns have a safety on their safeties. He found old Ironfist in his lab after that accident and--”

Brainstorm jumps up again from where he’s slouched, almost a meter into the air. Nightbeat never realizes how big he actually is-- a proper jet-- until he exercises himself like that. Brainstorm's eyes are glittering again.

“I’ve got it!”

Nightbeat’s visor blurs and flashes as it recalibrates to focus in on Brainstorm, who is now bouncing up and down on his toes just in front of him. He doesn’t got it, and the strength and suddenness of Brainstorm’s conviction is a little disorienting, leaving his mind racing along every strand of the web of possibilities he can imagine, trying to guess which one it was that he missed. Or maybe it was one he never saw at all. Those are always the worst.

Nightbeat doesn’t even have time to ask; Brainstorm is already breathless and going, excitement bubbling out of him, balanced on his tip-toes.

“It’s Toxin. He’s meeting up with Toxin. Why, you ask? _Because_ \-- obviously-- Crosshairs was at Kimia, and I was at Kimia, and as you so insightfully pointed out, our friend Chromedome was also at Kimia!” Brainstorm lets out a triumphant laugh. More like a cackle.

There is a long silence. It’s not the reaction Brainstorm is looking for. He leans in closer, a twinge to his voice like he’s overcharged, or delivering a movie villain speech, instead of… whatever this is. Torturing Nightbeat to death with the suspense, maybe.

(Try as he might, though, Nightbeat isn’t following. He cross-references the facts-- Brainstorm’s report is accurate as far as Chromedome’s Kimia posting during that period. Chromedome and Toxin have a shared frame model, a peri-war cold constructed model that Chromedome upgraded to around that time. Pretty uncommon. Unconventional alt mode. Not a lot of frame upgrades for cosmetic reasons in the middle of the war, either. Toxin has never been to Kimia-- cold constructed not too long after Cyclonus nearly wiped it off the map, Nightbeat notes as he cross-references Toxin’s file in his HUD. The process takes about the amount of time it takes Brainstorm to finish his dramatic pause.)

Brainstorm taps out his points against Nightbeat’s chest.

“If there’s something you should know, Nightbeat-- Primus knows something I’ve had to put up with-- it’s that just about _everyone_ seems to want to frag Chromedome. I’ve stopped asking why. Life isn’t fair.” Brainstorm manages to miss Nightbeat’s complete shock, mouth hanging open and all, and just keeps going. “But Crosshairs _didn’t_ frag Chromedome, and he sure isn’t now. But you know who he _is_ sneaking around with?”

The punchline hits, and Brainstorm lets out another borderline hysterical laugh when he sees Nightbeat’s mouth fall open. The thrill of success is really getting to him.

“Toxin!” crows Brainstorm, still bright magenta with warmth and his whole body humming in Nightbeat’s filtered vision, so close he can feel his exuberance.

Nightbeat is still scrambling to catch up-- to slot the pieces into the correct order. Into a schema he can understand. “Crosshairs… is meeting up with Toxin in the dead of night… because…”

“Because he’s always thought Chromedome is hot! And so, by extension, is Toxin. So he’s finally getting his chance now to, you know. Normally I’d be more fatigued about this, you would be too if you had--”

“Brainstorm!” Nightbeat isn’t sure what the word is for what he’s feeling right now. It’s all the rush and satisfaction of a mystery solved, but with the snare of another one pulling him along, wrapped up inside the satisfaction like a hook in a lure. Even more so, it’s _because_ it was _Brainstorm_ who figured it out that he’s spinning and tumbling deeper, inexorably drawn into this feeling he doesn’t understand. ‘Confusing’ is a mild word for it, but ‘bad’ doesn’t apply it all: _people_ just generally isn’t Nightbeat’s area, of specialty or of interest. But exciting, and intriguing… those he’ll take any day.

Brainstorm pauses at his name, like actually getting a real response came as a surprise. Or maybe it’s at the way Nightbeat’s hands have unthinkingly squared themselves on either side of Brainstorm’s shoulder vents. They’re very close to each other. Brainstorm’s eyes are dialed wide, and glowing gold. Nightbeat doesn’t understand how Brainstorm just _knew_ that. How he saw that when Nightbeat didn’t.

“You’re brilliant,” Nightbeat says. Brainstorm’s eyes recalibrate so fast they flash in the light and his vocalizer kicks out some kind of noise, but Nightbeat doesn’t take as much time to observe as he’d like, since without really planning it out, he’s already leaned into Brainstorm’s faceplate to kiss him.

Nightbeat’s not sure how long you kiss someone for, exactly-- he has some figures and averages on hand but nothing he’d call reliable-- and Brainstorm is stock-still for him except that he’s still gently trembling-- and Nightbeat isn’t sure if he didn’t do something horribly wrong here to begin with, so he pulls back sooner rather than later, to focus his visor on Brainstorm once more.

“Did I say you’re brilliant?”

“Um,” Brainstorm says, “no. Say it again.”

“You’re brilliant! I don’t know how in the seven hells you just put that together. Thank Primus I asked you or I’d still be on a sting every night until we find Cyberutopia.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Brainstorm flicks his wings. “You were smart enough to ask me. Um, Nightbeat, question.”

Nightbeat realizes abruptly his fingers are still wrapped around Brainstorm’s vents, but he doesn’t move. “Shoot.”

“The kiss-- the kissing-- very nice, thank you, but how about-- what if-- we did it without my mask?”

“Oh,” Nightbeat says. “Yeah. Sure. Yes. Do you want to--?”

Brainstorm makes a sort of ticking noise that Nightbeat thinks he might be doing with his tongue against his mask or his mouth as he winds his hands between Nightbeat’s arms. Nightbeat lets them fall, and leans in to watch as Brainstorm’s fingers work at the edges of his facemask, prying it loose. He’s sure that when he examined the other Brainstorm-- the dead one, the Decepticon one-- the facemask had screwholes, but it looks like Brainstorm has upgraded this one to a more… relaxed form. Maybe because there’s no need to keep the secret. Or just because carrying around a facial screwdriver would get in the way of moments like these. Hard to say.

The mask comes off with a satisfying click, and Brainstorm tosses it delicately onto the lab surface somewhere. Nightbeat has only seen him without the mask twice, one of those times alive. This is nice to add to the list, even if it is disorienting.

“What?” Brainstorm asks. Nightbeat is shocked to see how much his face moves underneath the mask. He doesn’t know what any of those minute twitches and tweaks are for, but they’re delightful.

“Oh, it’s nothing, I’ve just never seen your face up close when you were alive, without the face mask. You have,” what do people say? Nightbeat reaches up and touches Brainstorm’s cheek, whether it’s out of curiosity at the texture of the material or admiration, “a nice face.”

Brainstorm’s head tilts into his hand, so that Nightbeat ends up cupping his cheek whether or not he meant to; the jet’s wings fidget restlessly. “You saw my stupid alternate quantum self’s dead face? Did it look different? You know, stupider, or deader?”

Nightbeat considers. “Definitely deader. Stupider by extension of being deader. Very, you know, still and quiet, and all that. Very unlike you. I guess I’m just not used to you having a face, so you having one that moves and talks and isn’t dead is, whoa! Big twist. Very into it.” He’s been tracing his fingertips over Brainstorm’s face where it’s convenient, where he has the reach: running his thumb over the groove of his jaw, or the seams at his lips. 

“Thanks, me too.” Brainstorm’s voice is pitchy, and he rearranges his body. His hands settle on Nightbeat’s chest, the fingers curling into the edges of one of the panels. The feeling takes Nightbeat by surprise, more so than he thought it would; it takes him a few long moments to clear his thoughts. “What were we doing?”

“Oh, yeah,” Nightbeat says, and runs his thumb along one of the cables on Brainstorm’s cheek to feel the texture against his thumb once again. The ribbing of the cable over his thumb is grounding and pleasant. Faces aren’t Nightbeat’s strong suit, but Brainstorm’s is interesting-- new-- and he finds himself drawn to it. Going over the patterns and the way they bend when Nightbeat touches him, twitch with emotions Nightbeat can’t identify but is _so_ curious about. “Kissing.”

“I think you were saying something. About how you couldn’t have done it without me. As I recall.”

“Hmm.” Nightbeat thinks about it, like legitimately thinks about it, and Brainstorm starts to get antsy and wide-eyed again for half a klik before Nightbeat catches the game. The metaphorical game. “Dead on. I don’t know if I’d have made the connection, uh, ever. I’m still not one-hundred-percent sure how you landed there.”

Brainstorm trills lightly-- Nightbeat doesn’t know if he’d call it _quietly_ , or if Brainstorm’s ever done anything quietly in his life, although absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence-- and takes a couple steps backwards until he thunks against the lab counter. Probably guided by his EM field for the distance. Something clatters ajar; Brainstorm ignores it. His fingers fiddle with Nightbeat’s chest plating, delicate in that way they always are and maybe trembling just a bit, but so insistent.

Nightbeat smiles, and moves his fingers out of the way enough to lean in to press his mouth against Brainstorm’s. He’s kissed people before, but not anytime recently, and the feeling is very different from kissing Brainstorm’s mask; more wet, at minimum. Brainstorm makes some kind of noise of surprise that’s part static-- what he’s surprised about, Nightbeat can’t infer-- but Nightbeat feels those fingers catching a new grip on the cabling of his neck and pulling.

After a long (check internal chronometer) ten kliks, Nightbeat slowly pulls away. Something in his head has started ticking, like an overflow about to pop even as he feels both of their bodies heating up. The ticking says: _reassess, check, step back_. Like an invisible _caution_ flash on his HUD even without an alert. It’s disorienting. Nightbeat does a sensor check, internals check, EM check of the room, logical functions check just to be sure, and then redoes them-- all clear. He’s still gently stroking Brainstorm’s face, Nightbeat realizes.

“Wow,” Nightbeat says.

“Er,” says Brainstorm. “Yeah, wow. Is wow good? I thought wow was good.”

“Wow is great. Wow is ‘do that again sometime’.” Nightbeat pauses. “If you want.”

Brainstorm walks his fingertips up Nightbeat’s neck. It’s at once very cute and sends another invisible alert ping through him, one he’s still not sure how to begin figuring out. “Oh, I do. I mean, maybe, I am _ludicrously_ busy after all, ship’s genius. Maybe you’ll catch me between tests of my new transpatial scrambler gun if you’re lucky.”

Nightbeat grins. “Or in the middle of a test if I’m not lucky.”

“Exactly.”

Nightbeat fully steps away now with a mixture of relief and disappointment as Brainstorm’s hands slip away, going instead to smooth over his winglets. (Again, honestly: what is going on, note to self, investigate further, attach file: [▮▮▮▮ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮]).

“I’m going to find Toxin,” Nightbeat decides, precipitously: the main object is getting out of the room, the second being wrapping this up to some degree of satisfaction. The thrill of discovery is past, but there’s still not quite the proof. Just a good guess. But he really, really does need to go, as much because for once in his life he has no idea what to say as anything else-- and there very much is some lurking, invisible anything else. Nightbeat grins. “Catch you later.”

Brainstorm doesn’t reply, humming quietly.

Nightbeat stops at the door, leaving a lapse in the sound of glass embedded in his soles crunching underfoot, to look over his shoulder. Brainstorm’s back is to the door and his facemask still on the counter, bouncing on the soles of his feet, glowing bright pink in the infrared and his wings rustling.

Nightbeat catches himself grinning the rest of the day.

**Author's Note:**

> uhhhh what do i have to say about this. this isn't 'nightbeat is autistic so he doesn't know what sex is' like if i have my way they're gonna *** so don't get it twisted
> 
> anyway, more chapters possibly to come, i don't have specific plans but i do want to add more to this. see above.
> 
> xoxo


End file.
